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I've always loved that "insult" excerpt in showing the reality distortion field in full sway. He says he's completely ignorant about the technology. Despite th

by hajile 6y ago

I've always loved that "insult" excerpt in showing the reality distortion field in full sway. He says he's completely ignorant about the technology. Despite the tech potentially being better and him not knowing, he sidesteps his ignorance and damns the messenger with faint praise "I'm sure you could make some cool-looking demo" before moving on to platitudes about "people over tech". By the time 5 minutes has elapsed, he's mostly avoided the first question and everyone has completely forgotten the second question existed.

klodolph 6y ago
I don’t know what your personal experience is with OpenDoc is. I’ve used it, although I was never an OpenDoc developer. The developer isn’t really asking a question. They’re stating a challenge in the form of a question. This is something that happens here in the HN comments all the time, when people get into heated discussions. If someone asks me a question like that, I sure as hell am not going to try and give it a direct answer. The only reason the question was asked was to provoke Jobs into a particular line of discussion. Speaking of OpenDoc itself—sure, it seemed tragic when it got shut down. But it got completely steamrolled by—well, exactly what Jobs said—Java, in its various incarnations. The vision of how you combine data from different sources and different programs in 1997 onwards and put them in a single place is by writing Java apps, possibly some combination of web apps and applets. There have also been some analysis pieces out there on how Apple missed out on its potential in the 1990s because it didn’t embrace networking the way that, for example, Sun did. HyperCard, for example, could have been the web or it could have been FileMaker or it could have been PowerPoint.
- hindsightbias 6y ago
  > HyperCard It is interesting how many analysts and opinion folks have talked about that for decades. But Bill Atkinson was smarter than everyone else in that room (probably put together) and he didn't come up with the web either. The web wasn't an end-user physical product you could wrap hardware around. Why would Jobs or Apple think of it? Sun could because they sold web servers.
  - scruffyherder 6y ago
    The iPhone was/is an internet product. The barrier was the UI, and portability.
    - rusk 6y ago
      The barrier was getting people to take it seriously enough to the point where you could create a mass self-sustaining market. There were some great smart devices before iPhone, in particular Nokia and Palm but even going back to Psion and I remember noting when the first iPhone came in just how poorly specced it was compared to the incumbents. But riding high on the success of the iPod, Jobs could position the iPhone as a fashion accessory. The other smart thing he did was open up the platform for developers. At the time I think smartphone development was limited to crappy Java Apps, which solved the issue of the segmented market by offering a lowest-common-denominator set of APIs. Arguably for a platform to sustain itself and grow you need a virtuous cycle of a large marketplace feeding an active development community, which is sufficiently empowered to make great things for the platform thus further attracting customers to the platform.
nostromo 6y ago
And people watching the video don’t realize that the questioner was referencing a very rude comment Jobs had just made about a team of Apple developers, that had just been fired by Jobs, saying they had not done anything for seven years.
- jccc 6y ago
  Was that mainly a criticism of those developers, or of management? [Edit:] Okay, I see now it's referencing this part that I'd forgotten: "I read these articles about some of these people that have left. I know some of these people. They haven’t done anything in 7 years."
  - foobiekr 6y ago
    In reality, he would have been in the position to know. When you leave, you tend to get chatted up by two kinds of people - really good people, who want to do something interesting, and an army of really bad people, who think they can social engineer their way into coasting somewhere new that will succeed. I am certain Jobs had this experience with NeXT.
KKKKkkkk1 6y ago
> He says he's completely ignorant about the technology. Yeah, contrast that with Elon twittering about floating floating point [0] and too many zeros in fp32 [1]. [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1307822172556193793 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1307822172556193793 [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1307822172556193793 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1307822172556193793
- jiofih 6y ago
  You may wanna check that mirror of yours, what he’s saying is correct and nothing out of the ordinary.
jccc 6y ago
Apple was barely above comatose, running on vapors. The point was that even OpenDoc being "better" tech does not automatically mean Apple could/should make it into products and sell those products to customers. Apple needed to invest rapidly diminishing resources into actual products it can sell to actual customers that would save the company from imminent death. Whether you like, dislike, agree or disagree with that argument, I don't think it can be dismissed as "platitudes about 'people over tech.'" Jobs had to make bird's-eye-view decisions, and articulated that point of view pretty well here.
- linguae 6y ago
  Agreed. The other serious problem with OpenDoc, from a business standpoint, is that it could have alienated big software vendors such as Microsoft and Adobe from Mac OS at a time when Apple needed Microsoft's and Adobe's commitment to providing Mac versions of Office and Photoshop/Illustrator. Indeed, they even balked at porting their applications to the OpenStep/Yellow Box/Cocoa API, which forced Apple to change its Rhapsody strategy and announce Carbon in 1998. But OpenDoc's component-based software model would have been an even greater disruption: Microsoft and Adobe might have balked at supporting a platform that would make it easier for upstarts to compete by selling components. There's a nice Hacker News comment that is a repost of another comment that describes why OpenDoc didn't fit with Apple's business model and how the Linux desktop missed a big opportunity by not pursuing an OpenDoc-style approach to the Linux desktop in the mid-1990s when KDE was in its infancy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373
  - bradneuberg 6y ago
    KDE attempted to bring OpenDoc-lite style components into itself ~2000 with KParts, while Gnome attempted the same with the CORBA based Bonobo system at the same time. Neither was successful - the true path to inter operating compound documents was the Web with HTML and JavaScript ultimately, but that didn’t start coming into its own until about 10 years later.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
Miraste 6y ago
It's a mistake to lump the rest of his response under "platitudes." What he's saying there-work backwards from the customer experience rather than forwards from the tech-is the strategy that took Apple from bankrupt to $2 trillion. Technical people dismiss it all the time. If the technology is better, the thinking goes, it will win out eventually. It's the thought process that launched the Zune, Windows Phone, and decades of attempts at tablets. Apple's entire existence is predicated on letting other "clever" companies try this and torpedoing them with worse but vastly more usable versions of their advanced technology.
- rusk 6y ago
  It was both. Apple would never have succeeded without great engineers. I think he's downplaying the role that technology plays here to emphasise his point. What Apple/Steve did really well was to understand their market really well and channel technical efforts towards that and carefully curate the results. Another aspect that's often not noticed is how costs were managed on the other side. For instance to this day Apple doesn't support blue ray because it would deliver limited value but add to their bottom line. Similarly how they aggressively eliminated optical disks when they got the chance.
notafraudster 6y ago
The answer is not perfect -- the questioner might be correct that Jobs doesn't have a handle on the tech side of things. But I did think that the answer was coherent. He concedes that, without going into details, OpenDoc may be the better option technically, and surely in a sort of contrived case it would be possible to come up with situations where it is. I can't speak to the accuracy of the claim given I am not familiar with whatever the actual arcane debate was at the time, but I immediately infer from context that this is the questioner mad that Apple is giving up superior technology in favour of broader adoption technology. Then he says that it's actually not about the tech, it's about the extent to which the tech enables a good end-user experience. The printer anecdote is imperfect, but it is him highlighting a point he referred to many times in his career, which is that tech (and especially tech specs) is just a means to an end and people just by the end. Like how 3.x era Android phones often had more RAM or nominally higher clockspeed but were substantially less responsive to their contemporary iPhone competitors. I do think he dodges the second question entirely, but the second question is, in so many words, "You suck at your job. Care to comment?" so, like, what is the ideal answer to that? Crucially, he correctly senses that many in the audience empathize with the aggressive tack taken by the questioner and he admits that it's a fair tack and he has no real defence. If someone tells me "you suck at your job", I think I'd be more likely to respond to validate their anger than to actually take it to be a factual claim in need of rebuttal. If anything I'm shocked that Jobs had the empathy to read that correctly. I don't see it as RDF so much as it is an honest and coherent and adequate but imperfect answer.
- rusk 6y ago
  OpenDoc was if I recall correctly, Apple's answer to Microsoft's OLE/ActiveX/Whatever-it's-called-now and from what I recall it was a superior technology. I believe the core premise was to allow documents to not so much be embedded in one another as to make the document central to the work, rather than the application and the various (application) tooling would become involved when needed. I remember when I first made the switch to Mac around 2005 I did notice the experience of copy/paste between applications was inferior, but I didn't miss it that much. Looking back, I guess that maintaining that level of app integration is a huge amount of work, and there was a huge amount of overhead in managing a doc that in fact is being edited by multiple docs. I don't think I ever thanked anybody for embedding a doc in another doc. I think compared to where we were turn of the century we expect a lot less from copy/paste and I don't think anybody really misses it. Thinking about it now, from what I recall of Microsoft's "Longhorn", which was to become Vista it was trying to get this level of deep application integration to work was probably what set them behind and caused them to release a crocked OS and really put them on the back foot really until recently. I was just a kid at the time so I apologise to anybody more familiar with the story if I'm getting this all completely wrong. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that Steve was probably right about this in the end, and that developer made a fool of itself.
setpatchaddress 6y ago
No, RDF was a more intimate thing -- Steve's ability to tunnel into your brain through his eyes. No one was intense like Steve. What he was trying to convey here was that you can have the best technology in the world, but if there's no purpose for it -- if people don't want it -- you have nothing. OpenDoc and Newton, one of them a solution in search of a problem, and the other fifteen years ahead of its time, didn't seem like obvious winners to the former NeXT and current Pixar CEO. This shouldn't be a surprise.
philwelch 6y ago
One of the fatal faults of NeXT was that it was built around the basic concept of developing cool technology and trying to build a product around it. I think in that context, Jobs answered the question perfectly.
- scruffyherder 6y ago
  The only time they were making money was with WebObjects. They were onto something, but iTunes makes far more money than cool middleware
RogerL 6y ago
It's worth pointing out that the question was a pointed response to Job's first answer, where he was asked about Open Doc. Along the way, Jobs said the people complaining to the press hadn't done any meaningful work for the last 7 years. It's not really a question you should answer IMO. Whether the complainers did significant work or not is independent of what Jobs did. It's just a dumb 'gotcha' question with no gotcha. If the questioner had a legitimate beef with Jobs' productivity he could have been specific. And Jobs was extremely clear in his original answer as to what he was doing - reviewing tech, and 'putting a bullet in the head' to tech that didn't fit the overarching goals of Apple.
pritovido 6y ago
He was not telling people platitudes over tech, or avoiding the question whatsoever. He was telling people his thinking process. In essence is what real marketing is all about. That is not about finding how to sell something that they have but designing a strategy for the company to focus on creating what people need and are willing to pay that makes sense for the company. That technology is secondary is something that(most) engineers just don't get, because they have never sold anything or created a company in the first place. By the way he did not say that he was ignorant. He was not ignorant about anything his company did. He is saying that someone could know more about the tech but that what he actually cares about is how this tech is used, that is his job. Of course the decision maker does not know all the details. He is not God. His job is to focus on the important details for the company to survive and prosper, not trying to look cool.
opo 6y ago
Here is a different take on it: "...But Jobs's response is a perfect demonstration of what to do in this situation." https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/20-years-ago-steve-jobs-demonstrated-the-perfect-w.html https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/20-years-ago-steve-jobs-de...
JohnBooty 6y ago
He says he's completely ignorant about the technology. That's not how I've always interpreted it. Seems more like he's admitting he's not an expert in it, in deference to the audience member who's clearly pretty invested in the technology. Despite the tech potentially being better and him not knowing, he sidesteps his ignorance and damns the messenger with faint praise "I'm sure you could make some cool-looking demo" Wasn't Jobs right? What was OpenDoc good for other than tech demos? Was there ever a killer app? Document-based computing was intriguing, and in some ways it was of course a GUI extension of the Unix philosophy of chaining together multiple tools. But how well did it ever work? How do you sell that? Considering how badly companies struggle with GUIs to begin with, wouldn't we have compounded that by passing around these Frankenstein OpenDocs that were mashed together chunks of data that you had to use multiple bits of commercial software to manipulate? What if your fancy OpenDoc has 28 types of documents and the recipient only has 27 of the required viewers/editors installed? What about software version hell? What about document version hell? Maybe open and well-defined interchangeable data formats were the answer, but when has that ever worked out and why would software vendors even want to buy into that? Ultimately, in some ways it would have been cool to email a Lotus 1-2-3 doc embedded in a Word doc mashed together with an AutoCAD file but what was this solving? It's at best slightly more elegant than just three separate files, and at worse a complete and utter nightmare. Consensus seems to be that it was truly a solution without a problem, and at any rate not the kind of thing that would turn around a consumer-facing tech company. before moving on to platitudes about "people over tech". Again, not how I interpreted it. Seemed to me he pretty blunt - he didn't see how OpenDoc could be productized. It wasn't solving anybody's problems, and even the biggest OpenDoc fan (do they exist?) would probably have to admit it seems like more of a backend or groupware foundation. Not a way to sell Macs. has completely forgotten the second question existed. I'd say it was within his right to ignore a personal question. Especially since a lot of what he'd done during the years in question was quite public - NeXT, Pixar, etc. I support the first part of the guy's query, I guess, but it was rather graceful for Jobs to merely sidestep the question rather than address it more bluntly.
- linguae 6y ago
  I am a huge fan of the idea of OpenDoc and component-based software in general, to the point that one of my side projects is writing a desktop environment in Common Lisp that is inspired by OpenDoc is not a clone; the emphasis is not on document embedding, but on increasing programmability and flexibility while maintaining a GUI environment. It would be kind of like a modern Lisp machine running on Linux. I was also inspired by a Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373) about the Linux desktop could have benefitted from component-based software, where some of the commercial problems of OpenDoc would have been sidestepped by the wide availability of free, open source components instead of building FOSS analogues of large proprietary software packages. But with that being said, I agree with you that OpenDoc would have been a tough sell in the proprietary software world for the reasons that you gave. There's also the fact that 1997-era Apple was in no position to challenge Microsoft head-on by promoting component software. In order for the Mac to survive, Apple needed the backing of large software developers like Microsoft and Adobe who were willing to continue writing Mac versions of their popular, industry-standard software packages. OpenDoc might have made business sense in the late 1980s or even in the early 1990s as an alternative to the growing Windows ecosystem, but by 1996 it was too late; Microsoft Windows was the clear winner in the marketplace by a long shot, and Apple was spiraling down the drain before Steve Jobs returned. That's why it was a very big deal at MacWorld Boston 1997 when Steve Jobs declared that "the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over."

by hajile 6y ago

klodolph 6y ago

I don’t know what your personal experience is with OpenDoc is. I’ve used it, although I was never an OpenDoc developer. The developer isn’t really asking a question. They’re stating a challenge in the form of a question. This is something that happens here in the HN comments all the time, when people get into heated discussions. If someone asks me a question like that, I sure as hell am not going to try and give it a direct answer. The only reason the question was asked was to provoke Jobs into a particular line of discussion. Speaking of OpenDoc itself—sure, it seemed tragic when it got shut down. But it got completely steamrolled by—well, exactly what Jobs said—Java, in its various incarnations. The vision of how you combine data from different sources and different programs in 1997 onwards and put them in a single place is by writing Java apps, possibly some combination of web apps and applets. There have also been some analysis pieces out there on how Apple missed out on its potential in the 1990s because it didn’t embrace networking the way that, for example, Sun did. HyperCard, for example, could have been the web or it could have been FileMaker or it could have been PowerPoint.

hindsightbias 6y ago
> HyperCard It is interesting how many analysts and opinion folks have talked about that for decades. But Bill Atkinson was smarter than everyone else in that room (probably put together) and he didn't come up with the web either. The web wasn't an end-user physical product you could wrap hardware around. Why would Jobs or Apple think of it? Sun could because they sold web servers.
- scruffyherder 6y ago
  The iPhone was/is an internet product. The barrier was the UI, and portability.
  - rusk 6y ago
    The barrier was getting people to take it seriously enough to the point where you could create a mass self-sustaining market. There were some great smart devices before iPhone, in particular Nokia and Palm but even going back to Psion and I remember noting when the first iPhone came in just how poorly specced it was compared to the incumbents. But riding high on the success of the iPod, Jobs could position the iPhone as a fashion accessory. The other smart thing he did was open up the platform for developers. At the time I think smartphone development was limited to crappy Java Apps, which solved the issue of the segmented market by offering a lowest-common-denominator set of APIs. Arguably for a platform to sustain itself and grow you need a virtuous cycle of a large marketplace feeding an active development community, which is sufficiently empowered to make great things for the platform thus further attracting customers to the platform.

nostromo 6y ago

And people watching the video don’t realize that the questioner was referencing a very rude comment Jobs had just made about a team of Apple developers, that had just been fired by Jobs, saying they had not done anything for seven years.

jccc 6y ago
Was that mainly a criticism of those developers, or of management? [Edit:] Okay, I see now it's referencing this part that I'd forgotten: "I read these articles about some of these people that have left. I know some of these people. They haven’t done anything in 7 years."
- foobiekr 6y ago
  In reality, he would have been in the position to know. When you leave, you tend to get chatted up by two kinds of people - really good people, who want to do something interesting, and an army of really bad people, who think they can social engineer their way into coasting somewhere new that will succeed. I am certain Jobs had this experience with NeXT.

KKKKkkkk1 6y ago

> He says he's completely ignorant about the technology. Yeah, contrast that with Elon twittering about floating floating point [0] and too many zeros in fp32 [1]. [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1307822172556193793 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1307822172556193793 [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1307822172556193793 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1307822172556193793

jiofih 6y ago
You may wanna check that mirror of yours, what he’s saying is correct and nothing out of the ordinary.

jccc 6y ago

Apple was barely above comatose, running on vapors. The point was that even OpenDoc being "better" tech does not automatically mean Apple could/should make it into products and sell those products to customers. Apple needed to invest rapidly diminishing resources into actual products it can sell to actual customers that would save the company from imminent death. Whether you like, dislike, agree or disagree with that argument, I don't think it can be dismissed as "platitudes about 'people over tech.'" Jobs had to make bird's-eye-view decisions, and articulated that point of view pretty well here.

linguae 6y ago
Agreed. The other serious problem with OpenDoc, from a business standpoint, is that it could have alienated big software vendors such as Microsoft and Adobe from Mac OS at a time when Apple needed Microsoft's and Adobe's commitment to providing Mac versions of Office and Photoshop/Illustrator. Indeed, they even balked at porting their applications to the OpenStep/Yellow Box/Cocoa API, which forced Apple to change its Rhapsody strategy and announce Carbon in 1998. But OpenDoc's component-based software model would have been an even greater disruption: Microsoft and Adobe might have balked at supporting a platform that would make it easier for upstarts to compete by selling components. There's a nice Hacker News comment that is a repost of another comment that describes why OpenDoc didn't fit with Apple's business model and how the Linux desktop missed a big opportunity by not pursuing an OpenDoc-style approach to the Linux desktop in the mid-1990s when KDE was in its infancy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373
- bradneuberg 6y ago
  KDE attempted to bring OpenDoc-lite style components into itself ~2000 with KParts, while Gnome attempted the same with the CORBA based Bonobo system at the same time. Neither was successful - the true path to inter operating compound documents was the Web with HTML and JavaScript ultimately, but that didn’t start coming into its own until about 10 years later.
  - pjmlp 6y ago

Miraste 6y ago

It's a mistake to lump the rest of his response under "platitudes." What he's saying there-work backwards from the customer experience rather than forwards from the tech-is the strategy that took Apple from bankrupt to $2 trillion. Technical people dismiss it all the time. If the technology is better, the thinking goes, it will win out eventually. It's the thought process that launched the Zune, Windows Phone, and decades of attempts at tablets. Apple's entire existence is predicated on letting other "clever" companies try this and torpedoing them with worse but vastly more usable versions of their advanced technology.

rusk 6y ago
It was both. Apple would never have succeeded without great engineers. I think he's downplaying the role that technology plays here to emphasise his point. What Apple/Steve did really well was to understand their market really well and channel technical efforts towards that and carefully curate the results. Another aspect that's often not noticed is how costs were managed on the other side. For instance to this day Apple doesn't support blue ray because it would deliver limited value but add to their bottom line. Similarly how they aggressively eliminated optical disks when they got the chance.

notafraudster 6y ago

The answer is not perfect -- the questioner might be correct that Jobs doesn't have a handle on the tech side of things. But I did think that the answer was coherent. He concedes that, without going into details, OpenDoc may be the better option technically, and surely in a sort of contrived case it would be possible to come up with situations where it is. I can't speak to the accuracy of the claim given I am not familiar with whatever the actual arcane debate was at the time, but I immediately infer from context that this is the questioner mad that Apple is giving up superior technology in favour of broader adoption technology. Then he says that it's actually not about the tech, it's about the extent to which the tech enables a good end-user experience. The printer anecdote is imperfect, but it is him highlighting a point he referred to many times in his career, which is that tech (and especially tech specs) is just a means to an end and people just by the end. Like how 3.x era Android phones often had more RAM or nominally higher clockspeed but were substantially less responsive to their contemporary iPhone competitors. I do think he dodges the second question entirely, but the second question is, in so many words, "You suck at your job. Care to comment?" so, like, what is the ideal answer to that? Crucially, he correctly senses that many in the audience empathize with the aggressive tack taken by the questioner and he admits that it's a fair tack and he has no real defence. If someone tells me "you suck at your job", I think I'd be more likely to respond to validate their anger than to actually take it to be a factual claim in need of rebuttal. If anything I'm shocked that Jobs had the empathy to read that correctly. I don't see it as RDF so much as it is an honest and coherent and adequate but imperfect answer.

rusk 6y ago
OpenDoc was if I recall correctly, Apple's answer to Microsoft's OLE/ActiveX/Whatever-it's-called-now and from what I recall it was a superior technology. I believe the core premise was to allow documents to not so much be embedded in one another as to make the document central to the work, rather than the application and the various (application) tooling would become involved when needed. I remember when I first made the switch to Mac around 2005 I did notice the experience of copy/paste between applications was inferior, but I didn't miss it that much. Looking back, I guess that maintaining that level of app integration is a huge amount of work, and there was a huge amount of overhead in managing a doc that in fact is being edited by multiple docs. I don't think I ever thanked anybody for embedding a doc in another doc. I think compared to where we were turn of the century we expect a lot less from copy/paste and I don't think anybody really misses it. Thinking about it now, from what I recall of Microsoft's "Longhorn", which was to become Vista it was trying to get this level of deep application integration to work was probably what set them behind and caused them to release a crocked OS and really put them on the back foot really until recently. I was just a kid at the time so I apologise to anybody more familiar with the story if I'm getting this all completely wrong. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that Steve was probably right about this in the end, and that developer made a fool of itself.

setpatchaddress 6y ago

No, RDF was a more intimate thing -- Steve's ability to tunnel into your brain through his eyes. No one was intense like Steve. What he was trying to convey here was that you can have the best technology in the world, but if there's no purpose for it -- if people don't want it -- you have nothing. OpenDoc and Newton, one of them a solution in search of a problem, and the other fifteen years ahead of its time, didn't seem like obvious winners to the former NeXT and current Pixar CEO. This shouldn't be a surprise.

philwelch 6y ago

One of the fatal faults of NeXT was that it was built around the basic concept of developing cool technology and trying to build a product around it. I think in that context, Jobs answered the question perfectly.

scruffyherder 6y ago
The only time they were making money was with WebObjects. They were onto something, but iTunes makes far more money than cool middleware

RogerL 6y ago

It's worth pointing out that the question was a pointed response to Job's first answer, where he was asked about Open Doc. Along the way, Jobs said the people complaining to the press hadn't done any meaningful work for the last 7 years. It's not really a question you should answer IMO. Whether the complainers did significant work or not is independent of what Jobs did. It's just a dumb 'gotcha' question with no gotcha. If the questioner had a legitimate beef with Jobs' productivity he could have been specific. And Jobs was extremely clear in his original answer as to what he was doing - reviewing tech, and 'putting a bullet in the head' to tech that didn't fit the overarching goals of Apple.

pritovido 6y ago

He was not telling people platitudes over tech, or avoiding the question whatsoever. He was telling people his thinking process. In essence is what real marketing is all about. That is not about finding how to sell something that they have but designing a strategy for the company to focus on creating what people need and are willing to pay that makes sense for the company. That technology is secondary is something that(most) engineers just don't get, because they have never sold anything or created a company in the first place. By the way he did not say that he was ignorant. He was not ignorant about anything his company did. He is saying that someone could know more about the tech but that what he actually cares about is how this tech is used, that is his job. Of course the decision maker does not know all the details. He is not God. His job is to focus on the important details for the company to survive and prosper, not trying to look cool.

opo 6y ago

Here is a different take on it: "...But Jobs's response is a perfect demonstration of what to do in this situation." https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/20-years-ago-steve-jobs-demonstrated-the-perfect-w.html https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/20-years-ago-steve-jobs-de...

JohnBooty 6y ago

He says he's completely ignorant about the technology. That's not how I've always interpreted it. Seems more like he's admitting he's not an expert in it, in deference to the audience member who's clearly pretty invested in the technology. Despite the tech potentially being better and him not knowing, he sidesteps his ignorance and damns the messenger with faint praise "I'm sure you could make some cool-looking demo" Wasn't Jobs right? What was OpenDoc good for other than tech demos? Was there ever a killer app? Document-based computing was intriguing, and in some ways it was of course a GUI extension of the Unix philosophy of chaining together multiple tools. But how well did it ever work? How do you sell that? Considering how badly companies struggle with GUIs to begin with, wouldn't we have compounded that by passing around these Frankenstein OpenDocs that were mashed together chunks of data that you had to use multiple bits of commercial software to manipulate? What if your fancy OpenDoc has 28 types of documents and the recipient only has 27 of the required viewers/editors installed? What about software version hell? What about document version hell? Maybe open and well-defined interchangeable data formats were the answer, but when has that ever worked out and why would software vendors even want to buy into that? Ultimately, in some ways it would have been cool to email a Lotus 1-2-3 doc embedded in a Word doc mashed together with an AutoCAD file but what was this solving? It's at best slightly more elegant than just three separate files, and at worse a complete and utter nightmare. Consensus seems to be that it was truly a solution without a problem, and at any rate not the kind of thing that would turn around a consumer-facing tech company. before moving on to platitudes about "people over tech". Again, not how I interpreted it. Seemed to me he pretty blunt - he didn't see how OpenDoc could be productized. It wasn't solving anybody's problems, and even the biggest OpenDoc fan (do they exist?) would probably have to admit it seems like more of a backend or groupware foundation. Not a way to sell Macs. has completely forgotten the second question existed. I'd say it was within his right to ignore a personal question. Especially since a lot of what he'd done during the years in question was quite public - NeXT, Pixar, etc. I support the first part of the guy's query, I guess, but it was rather graceful for Jobs to merely sidestep the question rather than address it more bluntly.

linguae 6y ago
I am a huge fan of the idea of OpenDoc and component-based software in general, to the point that one of my side projects is writing a desktop environment in Common Lisp that is inspired by OpenDoc is not a clone; the emphasis is not on document embedding, but on increasing programmability and flexibility while maintaining a GUI environment. It would be kind of like a modern Lisp machine running on Linux. I was also inspired by a Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373) about the Linux desktop could have benefitted from component-based software, where some of the commercial problems of OpenDoc would have been sidestepped by the wide availability of free, open source components instead of building FOSS analogues of large proprietary software packages. But with that being said, I agree with you that OpenDoc would have been a tough sell in the proprietary software world for the reasons that you gave. There's also the fact that 1997-era Apple was in no position to challenge Microsoft head-on by promoting component software. In order for the Mac to survive, Apple needed the backing of large software developers like Microsoft and Adobe who were willing to continue writing Mac versions of their popular, industry-standard software packages. OpenDoc might have made business sense in the late 1980s or even in the early 1990s as an alternative to the growing Windows ecosystem, but by 1996 it was too late; Microsoft Windows was the clear winner in the marketplace by a long shot, and Apple was spiraling down the drain before Steve Jobs returned. That's why it was a very big deal at MacWorld Boston 1997 when Steve Jobs declared that "the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over."